Wojciech Zukrowski - Stone Tablets

“They work hard,” Istvan said.

“Very hard — and not very productively,” the professor added. “They lack fertilizer, tractors, and good seed. It is hard for them to scratch enough from the earth to keep body and soul together.”

“What could help them? They build the simplest machines themselves. They whittle them out of wood. They are proud of their windlasses, which are held together with pegs, without one nail. They are so proud that they put the Ashoka Chakra —Gandhi’s spinning wheel, a form of windlass — on the flag as a symbol of progress. Labor is cheap; life is cheaper yet. Plagues have stopped. The government tries to rescue them from the disasters of drought and locusts, so they reproduce, they multiply with mindless exuberance—”

“Family planning? Here?” the professor exclaimed disdainfully, seizing on Istvan’s point. “The women listen, they assent with gratitude to what they are told, they look at you with good, cow-like eyes — and nothing changes. They have nothing to feed six children and already the womb is swelling with the seventh. All around is the dry clay, baked by the sun. The grass is so depleted it cannot even serve as forage. Only the vultures shift from one leg to the other on flayed treetops. The mother gives herself to the child; the embryo is relentless. Such are the laws of nature. It robs her body. It leeches calcium from her bones. A generation of the sickly. Then there are the precepts of religion, vegetarianism. I have nothing against their refusing to eat meat, as long as they eat something. It is madness to be finicky about food when one is continually on the brink of fainting from hunger. After all, they have cattle enough. Whole herds go roaming around, destroying crops. Insane — this respect for life as an element of the divine. It is not permitted to slaughter them, but to drive a herd into a fenced-in square to die of hunger — that is allowed, and then the conscience is clear.”

The exasperated professor raised his big, bony hands toward the sun, throttled it with fingers yellowed by nicotine, and jerked as if at invisible curtains.

“It is known that they buy no contraceptives. They haven’t enough money for a pot to piss in,” he went on. “They do not use what is distributed for free because they do not believe in it, because it is contrary to their religion, because children are a blessing from the gods. They press on toward self-destruction with no more thought than insects. They were given necklaces with beads marking out the rhythm of the menstrual cycle and the infertile days. Do you think that helped at all? They pushed the beads around as if they were talismen, happy, eager to conceive — which only puts them at the mercy of the mechanisms of natural selection. The weak must perish, and they do. Mothers carry to the riverbank little skeletons in withered skin, to be covered with wood and incinerated. A frenzy of childbearing, for what? For death.”

“Perhaps you must turn to the men,” Terey offered.

“They lie on a ramshackle hammocks in front of their houses, wrapped in sheets and smoking hookahs. They gorge on the smoke in a mindless state of euphoria, drawing energy from the sun,” he said sarcastically, “so as to execute these dozen or so simple movements in the nighttime and beget a new life. They are also happy to be fathers, and then they fly into despair, they scream and cry at the moment of their child’s death. But they do not associate causes with effects. They remain fixed in a fairy-tale world of predestination written as if in stone ages before, of ineluctable fate. So what can be done with them?”

“Wish them a revolution,” he said harshly.

“They have too little vitality and muscle. They do not bear arms.” As he shook his head with a frown of disgust he reminded Istvan of a wire-haired terrier who has choked a rat and does not know what to do with it, where to throw it. “They only know how to achieve unanimity by saying no, to sit and let themselves be cudgeled: passive resistance. Their watchword, No violence, arouses respect. In practice it means no action, or, worse, not even the thought of it.”

“Yet you are profoundly dedicated to their treatment. You instruct them. You work hard to help them. It is not possible to demand too much from one generation, professor.”

“I work because I am interested in the opponent, trachoma. I have genuinely interesting cases here which I would not be able to find in Europe. I heal them, I teach them, and they go out into the same murderous conditions, only to be infected again. I am fully aware that I do not help them very much. But we work for the future. We look for new, easily adaptable methods, simple methods that appeal to common sense — practical antidotes. Someday they will awaken, and then our experience will be useful to them. Perhaps they will even build a temple to us and burn incense.”

“No one can help a man if he doesn’t want to be helped,” Istvan concurred. “Of all the gifts one can give another, free will is the most difficult.”

They sped on, bouncing over the washed-out asphalt in the dusty glare. The honeylike fragrance of blossoming grasses and grain blew toward them from the fields.

“Christianity formed the European character. It instilled the sense that others are our neighbors. We feel a common responsibility for the fate of the other man.” The Swede sneered as if he were chewing something bitter. “We want to defend him if he suffers harm. Marxism dealt with that in a pragmatic way, for no one likes to give up what belongs to him voluntarily, even to give of his excess. I subscribe to the view that sometimes it is necessary to take, to demand, to extort one’s fair share of bread.”

“But one must understand the indignation of people of good will in the West who respond to appeals for assistance when they are presented with images of poverty, hunger, sickness, and ignorance. They give generously, but as they do they wonder, they investigate, they analyze: ‘Why do we in Europe restrain ourselves, limit our birth rates, when those people in Asia indulge themselves, breed, multiply beyond all reason?’” Istvan interjected. “‘Why do we have to pay with renunciation for their unthinking folly elevated to the status of sacred principle?’ That is a problem in Africa and South America as well.” He rubbed his forehead wearily. “In the end this pernicious thought returns — I heard it once from an old peasant: ‘There must be war, for people have propagated too much. For flies there is the frosty autumn night, for people, war.’”

“That is amusingly put, except that now we can disappear, and with us all progress — rockets, penicillin, Picasso and Brigitte Bardot — and by chance these grass eaters may survive, mild as sheep, quiet, multiplying like the herbs of the field and as uncomplaining as herbs when they fall under the scythe. Or locusts,” he amended the comparison. “Locusts in human form, governed by their alimentary systems and their sex organs. By hunger and libido.”

The landrover braked hard.

“What is it?”

“Probably we should turn here,” the driver said worriedly. “The road goes off to the north. Check the map, sir.”

The professor spread the green-veined sheet of paper on his knees and ran his finger over the red dashes.

“Yes. We should be able to turn.”

The vehicle tilted violently, pushed its way into an eroding ditch, and climbed onto a road that led through the fields. They were shaken and thrown about so that they had to hold desperately to the grips. The bundles migrated slowly over the floor, pressing against their legs although their feet were tucked back.

“That was only the beginning. Not bad so far,” the Swede said comfortingly.

“Are you sure we turned at the right place, sir?”